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About Jesus Steve Sweetman The
Devastating Greatness of Our Lord Back
in the 1980’s some of us sang a song entitled, “Great Is The
Lord”.
This particular song is based on Malachi 1:5 that reads, “great
is the Lord, even beyond the borders of Israel”. I
often wonder if we really understand what we’re singing in our times
of worship.
This song is a prime example.
I think most of us understood the greatness of our
Lord in this song to be a wonderful, marvelous, and glorious thing.
The song was upbeat. It
encouraged us to expect great things from the Lord.
But, is this what Malachi had in mind when he wrote these words?
If you sang this song anticipating wonderfully
positive things from our Lord, you might want to read what Malachi
actually said. Like any good
Bible student, we need to understand the context in which these words
were written. If you read
Malachi 1:1 – 5, you’ll soon discover that these words don’t
represent a positive action on God’s part as you might have thought.
As a matter of fact, some people would be a bit agitated over
what Malachi says. They
might even say that Malachi is misrepresenting God. In the first five verses of Malachi the Lord was
attempting to tell Israel
how much He loved them. Part
of His explanation compared Israel
with Edom. God told Israel
that He still loved them even though they had strayed far from Him. On
the other hand, God was very angry with Edom
because of their wickedness. He
told This destruction of a nation by God demonstrates his
greatness and is what Malachi is talking about, and what we sang about.
This tells us something about God that many people
today don’t want to accept. This tells us that God judges nations, and
I believe history suggests that He doesn’t leave this judgment to the
end of this age. Over the
centuries He has caused nations to rise and fall, and He is still behind
the rise and fall of nations today.
Even though we’d like to think our western nations deserve
God’s goodness, there’s
another side to the story. God does judge nations today as He did in Malachi’s
day, and that includes our western nations. He
might well be in the process of doing
that right now. Of course
people of the world can’t see this.
They figure if there really is a loving God, He’d never do such
a thing to them. The
thinking that God could never judge You might want to think about what you’re singing next Sunday morning. What you sing might not be what you mean to sing. Some of us have stopped singing certain songs for this very reason. |